Monster’s Planet

Release Date: 2012

Publisher: Plinga

Developer: Plinga

Genre:

Sponsor:

Developed by Plinga, Monster’s Planet is a Facebook simulation game where players take the role as the god of a group of rare extinguishing monsters. In the game, players take the responsibility of working on their own way to breed various new cuddly-looking monsters ranging from insects, fish, birds, to huge mammals, so as to create their off-springs and build a unique monster planet.

Review:

Monster’s Planet itself is nice in graphics, which is vivified by the animation ambiance spread all over the game. However, there’s very limited interaction with monsters and the game doesn’t seem to follow the current virtual pet game trend, allowing players to “raise, train and fight” monsters.

Without any combat mechanic, Monster’s Planet undoubtedly falls into a breeding game genre. The ultimate objective of the game is to discover all new species of monsters and to get every multi-colored subspecies of each type to complete the monster encyclopedia. However, there are not many breeding contents in the game. Players acquire several monsters in the tutorial, instructing players to exact copies of the parent cells’ DNA and fuse them to create new eggs in the magic synthesis laboratory. But this system is far less interesting than it sounds. The process consists of clicking on monsters periodically to collect their DNA samples and then choosing a pair of DNA sample from DNA bank to combine.

Monster’s Planet differs a little bit from other combat monster games like Pokemon, Outernauts and Miscrits in term of breeding rules. Monsters do not have statistics that describe attributes and capabilities in combat. Instead, the rarity of monsters is determined by colors, which are inheritable traits passed down to offspring. The color mechanic works the exactly the same to each monster type ranging from the most common red to the rarest multicolored ones consisting of yellow, blue, green, orange and purple. Players can refer to in-game color combination diagram to anticipate what color they can get from matching certain colors together. Cross-species mating is also available in the game, but it is strictly defined by mating formulas and there are no ways to manipulate the formula to work for players. Since each monster will turn old enough to cut its own path to demise after player have extracted its DNA for several times, they will have to keep extracting DNA from newly-born monsters. These pretty much explain what players mainly do in this game.

Besides the monotony of gameplay, there are also serious localization problem with the game. Messages written in Russian frequently can be found everywhere in the game.

To sum up, Monster’s Planet is not interesting in short span of time and repetitive in the long run. It failed to bring me a good first good impression. More thoughts should have been introduced into the game in order to make it more appealing. However, based on what I have experienced in this game thus far, there isn’t much in Monster’s Planet in terms of play styles. So, I don’t think it is really worth the time investment.